


One Trip

by asarahworld



Series: The Doctor and Rose Tyler [54]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Tumblr: doctorroseprompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-11-26 07:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20926250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asarahworld/pseuds/asarahworld
Summary: The Doctor meets eighteen year old Rose Tyler and how can he not see her?  After an accidental visit to the Paternoster Gang, the Doctor realizes that he has missed her more than he'd realized and they  begin travelling together, despite the Doctor’s better judgment.  What happens when Bad Wolf starts appearing, following the duo across time and space?  And why do those words sound so familiar?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It’s the Paternoster Gang rather than Bill, but I didn’t want to do Bill a disservice by grossly mischaracterizing her when I haven’t seen her episodes [at the time of starting this project].

She’s eighteen and so beautiful (and far too young for him) and he watches jealously as she takes Mickey’s hand. His eyes cloud as she pecks the boy’s cheek, angrily thinking that he doesn’t deserve her. They’re young and happy, carefree even, not giving the world around them a second thought. One day, soon for her but far in the past for him, he’ll take her hand and they’ll start to run. Not normally the type of man to reminisce, he smiles softly as he starts to remember the adventures they’d shared.

He’s running, she’s halfway down the block about to cross the street, unable to see the truck turning the corner. He slams to the pavement, his body shielding hers from gravel and other road debris. Mickey stands beside them, looking surprised and thoroughly shaken, but he barely registers in the Doctor’s mind. He’s far more concerned about Rose.

“Are you all right?” He asks urgently, helping her back to her feet. She winces as she gets up and he feels guilty for brief rush of pleasure he’d felt as she’d touched his hand. He reaches out to touch her shoulder, jerking back when Mickey slaps his hand away. “I’m a doctor,” he growls, examining Rose. Nothing, thankfully, is broken (though he suspects a serious sprain) and he promptly tells her so, pointedly ignoring the younger man. She thanks him for saving her life and he awkwardly tries to brush it off, desperately pretending not to know her. He can see the TARDIS a few feet behind her and knows that he needs to leave.

But Rose is here and she’s cautiously asking if he’d like to get chips, in return for saving her life. He looks at her, and he must have some strange expression on his face because she is smirking as if he’d answered ‘yes’. Mickey protests, saying that he’s a stranger, an old bloke who might spirit her away and kill her. Well, three out of four isn’t bad. There’s no denying the fact that he was so much older than either of them. Or that he had invited Rose to travel (alone) with him across the universe. (Or that she had died, killed by the Time Vortex running through her head.) But he wasn’t a stranger, not from his perspective. They walk to the chippy and the Doctor sees new timelines forming in his head. Timelines where his Ninth (tenth, the part of his mind that was the Warrior asserts) self never met Rose Tyler. He pushes the thoughts away.

Rose reaches for her chips, wincing once more and the Doctor realizes that she must be in pain. Without thinking, he calls the TARDIS and she materializes around them and he quickly asks for her to bring forward the medbay. Very begrudgingly, she acquiesces, gently reminding the Doctor that her Wolf was not yet ready to meet him. The Doctor ignores her, scanning her shoulder with the sonic and sighing when the TARDIS confirms his suspicion. He tapes her shoulder with a forty-second century wrap, the sprain should heal within the next few hours.

“Where are we?” Rose is looking at him, confused and scared, though to anyone else who didn’t know her she’d be doing a fine job of masking those emotions.

“It’s called the TARDIS, it’s a spaceship. Is that all right?” He says, not wanting to overwhelm her, though knowing that she’ll be able to take it in.

“Is it alien?” She looks around, at the foreign equipment, at the walls, and (finally) at him.

“Yes,” he says quietly, anticipating her next question from his original timeline.

“Are you an alien?”

He nods, not quite able to believe that she was here, in the TARDIS.

Rose looks at him, clearly trying to decide if he was telling the truth. “What’s your name?”

“I’m the Doctor.”

“The Doctor? Doctor what?” Some things, it seemed, were set in stone, the Doctor thought.

“Just the Doctor,” he beams, not quite believing the scene in front of him. Rose Tyler was in the TARDIS (with the Doctor, like she should be).

“Is that supposed to sound impressive?”

He lowers his hand from where it had been resting against his mouth. “Perhaps.” And perhaps he wasn’t as against flirting as he’d once thought.

“People just call you ‘the Doctor'?” Rose asked.

“Usually. I am, as you can see, a man of intrigue and mystery,” the Doctor couldn't help but grin.

A wheezing groan fills the air. The TARDIS had moved. Automatically, he takes Rose’s hand and runs to the console room. London, 1895. On the doorstep of 13 Paternoster Row. A knock sounds at the door.

“Open the door immediately or I shall open it by any means necessary!” The shout made by the Sontaran is just credible enough that the Doctor obeys. “Ah, Doctor. You had better go on in, Madame heard your TARDIS land.” Strax frowns, peering into the ship. “Where’s the boy? I see you’ve brought a new one along.”

The Doctor looks back at Rose. She would never be content to stay in the TARDIS while he went in. “Her name is Rose,” he breathes, savouring how her name rolled off his tongue. 

“Where’s the other one?” Strax asks, remembering that his companion had been a young boy called Clara.

The Doctor ignores him, locking the door of the TARDIS. Rose looks from Strax to the inside of the house. “Where are we?”

“You know how I said that the box was a spaceship?” The Doctor asks, and Rose nods. “It also travels in time.”

“Is he an alien?”

“Yes.” Rose would be fine with this. “The lady of the house is not human, either.”

“Not human…but not an alien?”

She was brilliant. “She’s a Silurian. The first intelligent species on Earth. A highly advanced civilization that went into hibernation in anticipation of a meteor strike that never happened. What did happen was the rise of the planet of the apes. You lot evolved into humans.”

“Doctor,” a feminine voice enters the room and Rose looks up to see the Silurian woman. Her…scales were olive-coloured, and instead of hair she had three crests atop her head. At the sight of Rose, however, she hisses. “Strax did not mention the human. Where is Clara?”

“I don’t know.” His tone makes it clear – he does not wish to discuss her. Not when he has such a, dare he even think it, fantastic companion with him now.

“Who is this? Strax, why did you not say that there was a stranger in our midst?” Vastra calls for the alien.

“She is a companion of the Doctor,” the alien says, rather scathingly.

Vastra circles back to Rose. “Well, child?”

Rose looks to the Doctor, she trusted him (he’d saved her life), who simply watched her. The alien woman appears rather posh and so she elects to do a small, rather awkward, curtsey. “Hello.”

“Your new companion is remarkably calm.” Vastra eyes the Doctor. His companion. Perhaps she could travel with him. They could have a whole year together before she went back to meet the Ears. He shrugs, bringing his hand back to his mouth.

There is something…off, about his companion. Nothing wrong in the way that Clara’s echo had been, but Vastra has a feeling that the Doctor is up to something. There is something different about this girl, and Vastra is determined to learn what that is. There is a look in the Doctor’s eyes as well, softening whenever he looks at the young girl; if she hadn’t been so surprised, Vastra might have seen it for what it was – love.

There’s a knock at the door and a young, attractive woman bearing a tea tray enters the room.

“Well, what is your name?” The alien asks, accepting a cup of tea from the young woman. Silently, she hands tea around the room and Rose gratefully accepts, taking a calming drink before answering.

“’M Rose,” she says, and she sees a hint of something flash across the alien’s face. The woman takes a seat beside the alien, whispering to her. The Doctor jerks his head and the alien and the woman abruptly cuts off their private discussion, looking again at Rose with hard eyes. It’s only as Jenny takes her place beside her that Vastra realizes what the emotions are currently displayed on the Doctor’s face.

“Rose,” Vastra rolls the name over her tongue. “If you would excuse us for a moment.” The poor child nods and Vastra marches the Doctor out of the room, nearly slamming him against the wall. “Who is she,” she hisses. That the Doctor has become more reckless every time she sees him is concerning.

“Rose Tyler,” the Doctor answers, surprisingly open. Vastra frowns.

“Who is she to you,” she amends. She knows what a person in love looks like, and the Doctor has clearly fallen hard for the ape. He looks at her like she’s the centre of his universe, but the woman looks at him as if he’s a stranger. Woman. She’s barely a woman, no more than twenty, Vastra thinks.

The Doctor looks back to the door. “It’s a long story.”

“Then make it short,” Vastra presses. As bad as it is for the Doctor to travel alone, it’s not worth the risk to reality for the Doctor to interfere with his own past.

“I can hide her memories. Have a few more adventures with the love of my lives. I’m old, Vastra, and yet the rest of my lives have just begun anew. And already it’s been far too long since I’d last seen her. Two regenerations.”

“So you keep going back on her timeline every few regenerations and show her the universe over and over again? I am no expert on the human brain, but it seems to me that you would be constantly re-writing her future, while retaining the memories for yourself. And then what? How young is she now? How young will she be the next time?”

“And what would you do if it was Jenny,” the Doctor flipped the question. “If you had control over time itself and she was long gone, but you had the chance to have her back?” He knew the answer. Jenny had died, in this very room, when the Great Intelligence had tried to wipe out his entire timeline. An angry Silurian was not to be trifled with. But neither was a Time Lord.

“How dare you,” Vastra hisses and the Doctor takes a step back. “My Jenny died. She was murdered by the Great Intelligence before Clara reset the timelines.”

Clara. Again with Clara. Who was this mysterious Clara and why did he have a niggling feeling in the back of his mind that he ought to know who she was?

“Yes, and I lost Rose Tyler to a parallel universe. Jenny is with you every hour of every day – I have not seen Rose Tyler in millennia.” The Doctor fires back. Vastra had brought up valid points to his situation, but the Doctor did not want to listen.

“You can not go around plucking people from their timelines, especially when it affects your own,” Vastra counters. “From what I understand, you left her happy.”

“It broke the both of my hearts to do that,” the Doctor admits quietly.

“But you gave her yourself,” Vastra says gently. “How many people could do that?”

The Doctor turns, leaving the room. After a moment, the Detective follows. The Doctor was in love, besotted to the point that he was endangering his self.

One trip. One trip, and he'd take her home. One trip and he'd lock away her memories of this him. One trip to steal a day from his past self (more literally stolen from Rickey), to have one more memory of Rose Tyler. He takes Rose by the hand to escort her back aboard the TARDIS, puts the ship back into the Vortex, and asks to see her injured shoulder. Rose immediately shrugs out of her hoodie and it hits the Doctor like a ton of bricks that she's the most beautiful sight that he has ever beheld. How he ever could have forgotten her beauty is a mystery. He does a quick scan with his screwdriver, the test results appearing on the console viewer. Completely healed.

“That was the past,” the Doctor says, with an air of nonchalance. “How does the future sound? Or even better, an alien world. You met an ancient inhabitant of the Earth, and her wife. So for something different,” he grins suddenly. “First door on the left is the wardrobe. The TARDIS likes you, she doesn't normally move rooms around.” To say that he stretched the truth… the TARDIS loved Rose like no other companion.

Rose was gone twenty-four point one two minutes exactly. When she returned, gone was her pink on pink shirt. That the ship had picked the outfit was clear – her shirt was a shimmering lacey sort of material, layered over thick silver tights. Her soft trainers had been replaced by a pair of worn but sturdy boots. “You look, nice,” he stumbles over the words, silently cursing himself. She looked stunning, as ever, and the Doctor marvelled at her exquisiteness. He holds out his arm, rather stiffly, his hearts pounding in his throat as she takes it.

“Have we really moved again? Where are we? When are we?”

“It's called Woman Wept. About two thousand years in your future,” [six hundred years forward from his last visit to the planet] the Doctor snaps and the TARDIS doors open.

“It's beautiful,” Rose doesn't let go of his arm as she steps outside. Privately, the Doctor thinks that the beauty of the planet pales in comparison to the young human [too young, the voice in the back of his head says] at his side [like she should be, he bites back]. He allows Rose to lead him across the planet, taking in not only the sight of Rose but her experience of the new planet.

Unbidden, his first memory of seeing Rose on an alien world comes to the front of his mind. Well, among alien people, he amends, remembering Platform One. They walk in silence, and the Doctor looks at Rose, knowing but still needing to guess what she’s thinking.

“People don’t live here, do they?” Rose asks.

“Depends what you mean by people. But, no, the planet hasn’t been colonized yet.”

“I mean people. What do you mean?” Again, she says something so like her proper introduction into his life that it jars the Doctor, snapping him back to the danger of the reality he is living. The touch of her hand in his overrides his rational mind and he easily answers that ‘people’ includes most sentient life forms. Like Vastra and Strax (and himself).

“Aliens. Sentient beings who lived on the Earth before the rise of apes. Humans. Nonhumans,” the Doctor strives for nonchalance.

Rose looks out at the glacial mountains. “What’s your planet like?”

Of course she would want to know. But with Gallifrey…missing, he felt even less like speaking of his homeworld than usual. “Twin suns set over the red fields, with a warm breeze rustling. The trees were silver and when the morning light hit them, the world looked like it was set afire.” He stopped his oddly poetic description, looking down as her free hand covered his.

“Sounds beautiful.” Rose’s face is alight with curiosity and wonder.

The Doctor shrugs. “The planet was nice enough, I suppose. I haven’t been there since… since the War.” The War. Yet another thing he did not want to think of. The Time Lords would be beyond furious with his actions. The way he was twisting the timelines right now was chaotic at best, universe-ending paradoxical at worse.

“I’m sorry,” Rose’s hand gently squeezes his own.

“Still, I’ve got the TARDIS. A whole universe to explore,” he grins. “Not a bad life.”

“There’s me,” Rose says softly. The Doctor looks at her face, trying to keep the more-than-friendly concern from showing.

“It’s been more than sixteen hours since you came onboard, you must be tired,” he deflected. “The TARDIS will have a room for you.”

The ship hums, both in agreement and chastising him. It’s dangerous keeping her with him, no matter how much they both have missed her.


	2. Chapter 2

He takes her to Woman Wept, to the night markets on Fel-Spoon, to Elvis Presley singing on the Ed Sullivan Show. He shows her the universe as she, once again, becomes his whole world. He can’t get enough of her – her laughter, her smile, her innate Rose-ness that he’s missed so much these past millennia.

A month passes in the blink of an eye, then another. 

“Is this what you do, then? Travel around the universe, saving people?”

“When I can.”

“On your own?”

“Got you now, haven’t I?”

She’s quiet for a moment, her large brown eyes thoughtful. “Are there others?”

In a way, he’s glad she’s asked. It’s a question that ought to be much more common with his travelling companions, especially once they’ve learned the TARDIS is a timeship.

“Yes.” But Rose Tyler was perhaps one of the most important, in his hearts.

“What happened to them?”

Curious as ever. He answers her questions as truthfully as possible. They all left in the end, whether by choice or circumstance. His companions, his people – the one constant in his lives was the TARDIS (and, though he dared not admit it, his love for Rose Tyler).

“There’s me,” she says, slipping her hand into his. Those words, that gesture, only serve to remind him that they are stealing time away from her to satisfy his own selfish longing.  
He says nothing, re-memorizing the sensation of her fingers intertwined with his.

She asks about home after the start of their third month together. “I mean, we just left. And Mickey, oh my god, I just left him in the middle of the street. He probably thinks you’ve kidnapped me. And my mother, I’ve just started to get on with her again and now I’ve swanned off without a word!”

“Do you want to go back,” the Doctor asks quietly.

Rose looks at him. “This has all been so incredible. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I just…”

Domestics. For Rose Tyler, he would do anything.

“All right then. Next stop, Powell Estate.” He pulls the dematerialization lever with extra flourish. Before opening the door, however, he makes sure to check the chronometer.  
Fourth of March, 2004. The Doctor doesn’t manage to stop himself from reaching for her hand as they step outside. For whatever reason, she doesn’t seem to mind. But before they can go anywhere, Mickey appears.

“Hey babe. Was just about to call you. Match is on in fifteen and I won a few quid in the lotto last week. Can get us an extra basket of chips at the pub today, what do you think?”  
His eyes slide from Rose to the Doctor. “Who’s this?” He asks protectively.

“This is the Doctor. He saved my life the other day, remember?”

“Yeah. Thanks mate.” Mickey turns back to Rose rather swiftly. “Coming babe?”

“No, I think I’m just going home. I don’t know, I’m just kinda tired.”

“Sure thing, babe,” Mickey replies distractedly. “I’ll see you after the match.” He kisses Rose quickly, then takes off to the pub. Rose stares after him.

“He didn’t even notice.”

“Most people tend not to notice things,” the Doctor says cryptically, knowing that his statement applied to himself more than to Mickey.

“Is this it then? I’m back here and you’ll just swan off in the TARDIS and disappear?”

Yes. It’s for the best, trust me. You’ll see me again. 

There’s graffiti on the brick wall behind them, mostly illegible, but the Doctor stares at the two words he is able to make out. BAD WOLF.

“Don’t you want to see the universe?” He asks instead.

Rose’s face lights up. “Yeah.”

Bad Wolf was Rose. Bad Wolf was directions for Rose. Perhaps this was fated to be.


End file.
